LONDON

Well, an F.B.I. agent on friendly terms with a Florida socialite (enough to send her shirtless photos of himself) can, on the basis of a half-dozen mildly harassing e-mails she had received, set in motion an invasive inquiry that ends up leaving the C.I.A. without a permanent director and putting the appointment of the next Supreme Allied Commander in Europe on hold.

The United States is a very serious country that from time to time opts to turn itself into a complete joke.

The headline is obvious enough: Surveillance State Devours Its Own. I am not sure whose morals would stand up to this degree of intrusion.
The weirdly intersecting dalliances of Jill Kelley (just one more super-leveraged American throwing wild parties in Tampa as her family plunges into debt), Paula “Keep-Your-Hands-Off-My-General” Broadwell, David “Peaches” Petraeus and General John “I’m-Seriously-Into-E-mail” Allen happened to emerge as Google published its semi-annual transparency report about government demands to see its users’ private data.

The report for the first six months of 2012 makes interesting reading. Of the 20,938 requests for access to Google accounts from nations around the world, by far the largest single number — 7,969 — came from U.S. government agencies. The percentage of those U.S. demands that were “fully or partially complied with” by Google was also by far the highest — 90 percent. (Of Russia’s 58 requests, zero percent were complied with, and of Britain’s 1,425 requests, 64 percent were acted on). In all the U.S. requests targeted a total of 16,281 users or accounts in the period, almost half the global total of 34,614.

So the fact the F.B.I. gained access, on the basis of not much, to Broadwell’s Gmail account, where it stumbled on evidence of her affair with Petraeus, is not that unusual — even if Kelley’s initial complaint about cyberstalking e- mails written under the pseudonym KelleyPatrol was flimsy and would, it seems, have gone nowhere without a push from the friendly or perhaps smitten F.B.I. agent (who was subsequently taken off the case).

I know this is convoluted. The movie, coming soon, will cut some details in the interests of plot clarity. Of course, with due prurience, the movie will also play up the “seductress” Kelley and dwell, as the media has done in outrageous but predictable fashion, on her “Middle Eastern” forbears.

Now, I applaud President Obama for saying that he hopes Petraeus’s affair “ends up being a single side note on what has otherwise been an extraordinary career,” and for expressing the hope that “he and his family are able to move on.” Or at least I hope that scrutiny of Petraeus’s life focuses not on his “All In” biographer and paramour Broadwell but on his achievements turning the tide in Iraq and on the failure of the Iraq-modeled “surge” he backed in Afghanistan, where many U.S. Marines and other members of the Armed Forces perished for nothing during Obama’s first term. (This was a nonsubject during the election campaign.)

What Obama did not say, of course not, is that Petraeus and Allen (and Kelley and Broadwell) are all in some measure victims of the Surveillance State the president inherited from George W. Bush and has spent the past four years consolidating and expanding. Among other things, Obama has tried to amend the Patriot Act to give the F.B.I. ever greater intrusive powers. In 2010, The Washington Post reported that every day the National Security Agency intercepts and stores “1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communication.”

Obama declared in 2009 that we “cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values.” His success in fulfilling that pledge has been distinctly mixed. The drone-led battle against terrorism takes place in a world largely beyond due process and the rule of law. And the privacy of Americans is intruded upon daily in ways that flout the Fourth Amendment.

Now his top generals, older men drawn to younger women, have ended up caught in the invasive web. The irony of a security apparatus turning on its security chiefs is impossible to escape.

The president says national security has not been compromised in any way. So what, pray, is the issue here? Allen’s flirtatious banter with Kelley? The ultimate failure of Petraeus the perfectionist to meet his own impossibly high standards? Or rather the deeply troubling fact that this F.B.I. inquiry digging into in-boxes was possible in the first place?

But never fear, the movie — working title “Downfall” — will not get into this. It will feature the Kelleys’ lavish parties for guests from MacDill Air Force Base — complete with flowing champagne, valet parking and couture fit for the Kardashians — but will steer a very long way from Fourth Amendment issues. Unless a good-looking lawyer with a conscience gets written into the script.